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The actress, who won an Oscar last year for her role as the Queen, revealed to GQ magazine that she took the addictive drug until the early 1980s, when she would have been in her late 30s.

Helen Mirren has admitted taking cocaine in the past

Dame Helen, 63, only quit after the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was snared, and found to be making money from the Class A drug.

Asked whether she had ever taken any illegal substances, the star, who became a household name as Prime Suspect’s DCI Jane Tennison, told GQ magazine: “A bit of dope when I was younger.”

On whether she had taken anything else, she added: “A bit of cocaine. I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties.

“But what ended it for me was when they caught (Nazi war criminal) Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, in the early 80s. He was hiding in South America and living off the proceeds of being a cocaine baron.

“And I read that in the paper, and all the cards fell into place and I saw how my little sniff of cocaine at a party had an absolute direct route to this f****** horrible man in South America. And from that day I never touched cocaine again. Until that moment I had never grasped the full horrifying structure of what brings coke to our parties in Britain.”